In the Gold of Time

Claudie Gallay (translated by Alison Anderson)

A young father — whose name we never learn — takes his wife Anna and their twin daughters to their summer home, a cottage by the sea in the Normandy port town of Dieppe.

Returning from the local grocer’s on the afternoon of the girls’ seventh birthday, needing strawberries to finish their cake, he sees an old woman struggling to carry her bags, and lends assistance. It is only upon reaching home that he realises he has left the strawberries behind with her. They are an excuse to go back, and he does, the following day.

Alice is a strange, contrary and alluring type who lives with her mute sister, Clémence. Though she and the story’s main protagonist are separated in age by decades, they embark on what is, in essence, a love affair.

Her life is cloaked in mystery, one made only more intense by the tribal artefacts that clutter her small house, the photographs, ceremonial masks and, most of all, the kachinas, strange statues carved from mud or wood and believed by the Hopi to incarnate the spirits.

The story she offers is one which, until now, has gone untold: of her childhood spent in Arizona, around the reservation of the secretive Hopi people, having escaped the horrors of the second world war.

Her father was a photographer of some renown, and existed as and part of an exiled artistic collective that also included the likes of Mondrian, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Andre Breton, whose epitaph inscription — ‘I seek the gold of time’ — supplies this novel’s title as well as, in some abstract way, defining its theme.

Our protagonist is captivated, and finds himself drawn back again and again to sit and chat with the often ill-tempered Alice. Day after day he is drip-fed threads of tale, until something whole and wholly tragic begins to form.

The problem, though, is that his time is not free to give, and the cost of his indulgence is a growing sense of disconnection with his own family.

He tries hard to strike a balance, and he frees up hours so that he can swim with them, and walk the beaches and eat at shellfish restaurants, but Anna, a displaced beauty who craves the spark of Parisian life, needs more. She needs her husband.

In the Gold of Time is a small, quiet novel that reveals its astonishments slowly, in a beautifully understated way, through short, musical sentences that amass to form their own kind of poetry.

Plot and even character development seem of secondary importance, behind considerations of time’s elasticity and of the gaping silences that can exist between even the closest of people.